Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our district sponsors an event called The Lay Leadership Summit. It’s a big conference designed to help church volunteers do their jobs better. There are about 50 learning tracks (each with four workshops) ranging from children’s ministry to using the internet effectively to using lighting and sound systems. We, of course, sponsor a college ministry track.

I mention all this by way of introduction to mention two people I interacted with this weekend: Dan Betzer and John Abela.

Dan Betzer is a legend in the Assemblies of God–he’s an incredible speaker, a missions fanatic, and an extremely successful pastor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, incidentally, blogs).

Anyway, I learned two things about him this weekend:
1) he once lost his ministerial credentials for seven years for flouting the hierarchy’s rules
2) he’s such an introvert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that people feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have never had a conversation. I gleaned one tidbit from his sermon and another from a friend of his.

The second person I met was John Abela. John is a former core member of the phpBB2 team and runs the most popular conglomeration of Assemblies of God websites in the world. I am told that his total bandwidth exceeds that of all the national Assembly of God websites in every nation combined.

That tickles me. Many of our leaders attempt to lead by limiting information and don’t seem to realize that’s no longer possible. John has effectively done an end run on a ton of stupid rules in the Assemblies of God and because he’s a layperson no one can stop him–he’s got no credentials for them to revoke. I love it.

He mentioned that he gets a phone call from some AG official or another about once a week asking him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allowing for conversational hyperbole, that sounds about right. He’s making people nervous enough that we’ve even had resolutions at General Council prompted by one of his sites.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s making our movement better by using the web to help people. Kudos to him.